Day: April 7, 2016

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Labour Department starts aiding ATV staff

http://news.rthk.hk/rthk/en/component/k2/1253115-20160407.htm

 

Federation of Trade Unions lawmaker Bill Tang said on Thursday that the Labour Department has sent out cheques to 25 former ATV staff who have applied for assistance through the Protection of Wages on Insolvency Fund.

Tang said the payments total around HK$1 million.

He said it is a good sign for the remaining several hundred unpaid ATV staff members as well because the government now seems to have decided that the beleaguered station will go into bankruptcy soon.

The cash-strapped station went off air last Friday, ending nearly 59 years of broadcasting in Hong Kong. But some people linked to the station had hoped to continue its existence as a web-based and satellite TV station.

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Early Voting for General Elections Kicks Off

http://world.kbs.co.kr/english/news/news_Po_detail.htm?No=118186&id=Po

 

Early voting for the April 13th general elections started on Friday morning.

Officials set up three-thousand-511 polling booths across the country for the early voting period that will run through Saturday. During the two-day period, eligible voters can cast their ballots between 6 a.m. to 6 p.m. at any polling station and must bring a valid ID.

Booths have been set up at Seoul Station, Yongsan Station and Incheon International Airport to increase voter turnout. The National Election Commission is providing taxis for the disabled among other transportation services to also raise the turnout rate.

Early voting was first adopted in South Korea in a by-election in 2013.

As of 9 a.m. Friday, some 278-thousand people cast their ballots, accounting for zero-point-66 percent of some 40-million voters.

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Diet OKs change to allow voting at stations, malls

http://www.japantoday.com/category/politics/view/diet-oks-change-to-allow-voting-at-stations-malls

TOKYO —

The Diet has enacted a law that allows voters to cast their ballots for national and local elections at polling stations to be set up at train stations and commercial complexes such as shopping malls.

The government-sponsored bill to revise the Public Offices Election Law passed a House of Councillors plenary session with the backing of the ruling Liberal Democratic Party and its coalition partner, the Komeito party, as well as the Democratic Party and other opposition parties.

Hoping to raise voter turnout, the revised law also enables local governments to extend polling hours for people wishing to vote before an election day. Under the amended legislation, local governments can open polling stations by up to two hours earlier from the current 8:30 a.m. or close them by up to two hours later from 8 p.m.

The revision will take effect June 19, meaning that it will apply to this summer’s upper house election.

According to the revised law, local authorities can set up “common voting stations” on election days in high-traffic locations such as train stations, shopping centers and other public facilities, in addition to current polling stations.

At present, people are allowed to vote on an election day at only one place, usually a school or public office in the neighborhood where they live, designated by election administration authorities.

In some municipalities, people can already cast votes before an election day at commercial complexes and other places, but not on a voting day.

The legal change coincides with enforcement the same day of the lowering of the voting age to 18 from the current 20. With the move, about 2.4 million people aged 18 and 19 will newly become eligible voters.

© KYODO

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‘In Canada Alone, There Are 66 Gender and Women’s Studies Departments’

‘In Canada Alone, There Are 66 Gender and Women’s Studies Departments’

 

The astonishing fact in the headline — the proliferation of what I’ve calledThe Feminist-Industrial Complex in higher education — is cited by Professor Janice Fiamengo in her 15-minute YouTube video with the provocative title, “Women’s Studies Must Die.”

 

These programs in Canadian universities, she explains, employ hundreds of professors, both full-time and part-time, and when you consider that there are roughly 10 times as many Women’s Studies programs at U.S. colleges and universities (now on more than 700 campuses nationwide), you realize that there are now thousands of faculty whose primary occupation is indoctrinating students in feminist ideology.

Women’s Studies programs “have no more place at a university than voodoo,” Professor Fiamengo says, because “these courses are not about knowledge. They’re about theories of oppression and resistance,” many of them taught from radical Marxist, “queer” or postmodern perspectives. “The fundamental tenets of feminism are not up for debate” in Women’s Studies programs, as Professor Fiamengo explains. As I have elsewhere noted, Women’s Studies courses are not about teaching facts, but instead are about training political activists. Cult mind-control methods are employed to induce students to accept “feminist consciousness,” which is essentially a religious faith in women’s universal victimhood under patriarchal oppression. Taxpayers are required to fund the higher education system where these beliefs are taught; feminism is thereby subsidized and approved as a matter of official government policy.

 

The best analysis of what is taught in these programs is Professing Feminism: Education and Indoctrination in Women’s Studies, by Daphne Patai and Noretta Koertge. Professor Patai is also author of another excellent book I highly recommend, Heterophobia: Sexual Harassment and the Future of Feminism. For decades now, these programs have continued with little critical scrutiny, either within academia or from legislators in charge of approving education budgets. Why? Because anyone who questions the need for Women’s Studies courses will instantly be accused of sexism, a rhetorical weapon that feminists have used to expand their hegemonic power within academia, and to silence critics of their agenda.

“I spent years studying feminist theory,” Professor Fiamengo says in her video. “I learned things that are untrue, about ‘gender is a social construct’ and about the ‘deep-rooted misogyny of patriarchal culture,’ and it took years to unlearn them. That hundreds of thousands of students across North America still learn these untruths . . . is staggering.” Indeed, it is staggering that so few citizens — most of whom think of “feminism” as essentially harmless belief in “equality” — are unaware of the hateful ideology being promoute in our universities.

People need to wake the hell up.